Export

Export downloads a copy of the content you authored — recipes, photos, settings, your catalog, and your store layout — packaged into one ZIP file you can re-import elsewhere.

Your recipes come back exactly as they left: every detail of a recipe survives the trip out and back, including shapes the plain-text form can’t spell. What the ZIP doesn’t carry is everything around them — see what’s not included — so it’s a portable archive, not a disaster-recovery backup. A full backup of a self-hosted install means backing up the database and storage volume directly; that’s the server operator’s job, not this download.

How to export

Tap mirepoix in the navigation bar, then choose Kitchen Settings. Under Data, click Export All Data (available to every kitchen member) and confirm the prompt. Your browser downloads a .zip file immediately.

What’s included

All recipes, in two forms — a readable .md file per recipe, in the recipe format, plus a .json file per recipe in a recipes/ folder. The .json records the recipe exactly and is what an import reads; the .md is the readable copy
Recipe photos — one image per photographed recipe, in an images/ folder
QuickBites, in two forms — a readable quick-bites.txt, in the plaintext format, plus a quick-bites.json. The .json records every name and ingredient exactly and is what an import reads; the .txt is the readable copy
Ingredient catalog — your custom ingredients, with aisle assignments, how often each one is checked, whether it’s set to Don’t ask, and the stores each one is placed at — including the aisle you set for it at each store
Your edits to catalog ingredients — when your kitchen has changed a catalog ingredient’s aisle or store placements, set how often the Pantry checks it, or set it to Don’t ask, that edit travels too. On import, each edit re-attaches to the matching catalog ingredient on the new install. If the destination’s catalog doesn’t have that ingredient, the edit is skipped and noted in the import summary — never guessed at
Kitchen settings — your site title and the show-nutrition toggle
Store list — the stores you’ve set up, in order
Aisle and category ordering — your custom sort orders
Archive manifest — a small file recording the export format version, which is now 4. An older archive, written before the recipes/ folder existed, still imports

What’s not included

Meal-plan and shopping state — menu selections, grocery check-off, pantry, and the record of which recipes have been on the menu are not carried.
User accounts and memberships — sign-in state and kitchen memberships stay where they are.
Whether the kitchen is published, and its name — these are left out on purpose, so importing never publishes a kitchen or overwrites its name.
API keys — these are environment variables set at the deployment level, not stored in the database. Configure them in your docker-compose.yml or .env on the new install.
Nutrition figures and unit conversions — an ingredient’s nutrition, its weights for a cup, one item or a named portion, and whether it’s left out of nutrition stay behind, including any your kitchen entered itself. In a new kitchen, an ingredient the built-in catalog knows uses the catalog’s figures. One the catalog doesn’t know has no nutrition there, so recipe lines that use it aren’t counted until it’s added to the catalog. To ask for that, use Report this.
Derived data — IDs, timestamps, and recomputed nutrition are regenerated on import, so they’re not part of the file.
Recipe sketches — the drawings on recipe cards stay behind, and so does the setting that draws them. A recipe an import adds arrives without a sketch. If the kitchen you import into has sketches on, Mirepoix draws it one in its once-a-day catch-up.

When you import, kitchen settings only fill in a destination kitchen that’s still using the defaults. If you’ve already customized a setting there, your value is kept — the import never overwrites it.

Using the export

The ZIP is re-importable on any Mirepoix installation. Use it for:

Migration — move a kitchen to a new server or installation, settings and store layout included
Reading offline — the .md files are plain text and open in any text editor
Editing offline — possible, with one extra step, described next

Edit a recipe offline

For each recipe, an import reads the file in the recipes/ folder in preference to the .md. So editing a .md and re-importing the ZIP as-is does nothing: the .json is read instead and your edit is skipped, with nothing to tell you. Change the # Title line and it’s worse — the edited file no longer matches its .json, so both are read and you end up with two copies of the recipe.

To bring a hand-edited .md in:

Edit the .md, keeping it in the recipe format.
Delete that recipe’s file from the recipes/ folder — it’s named for the recipe’s web address, not its title.
Re-zip the folder and import it.

With no .json beside it, the .md is read as written. Delete only the ones you edited: each recipe is decided on its own.

One thing to know before you edit: the .md is a rendering, not the full record. A handful of shapes the text format can’t spell — a step that mixes a cross-reference with its own ingredients, two cross-references in one step, an untitled step alongside titled ones that isn’t a leading cross-reference, a prep note written on a substitute — come back changed, or fail that file’s import outright. The .json is the copy that carries them. Where a recipe uses one of those shapes, edit it in the app instead.

Your QuickBites work the same way. quick-bites.json is what an import reads, so an edit to quick-bites.txt beside it is skipped. Delete the .json, keep your edited .txt, and re-zip — the text file is then read as written.